Friday, June 29, 2018

Thanksgiving Play

Larissa FastHorse is a Native American playwright, a member the
Rosebud Sioux tribe, Sicangu Lakota Nation. She has been involved with
most prominent projects involving indigenous artists. She is most noted
as a playwright-activist, having found many ways to bring indigenous
stories to the American theater.

FastHorse explains, “I have again and again heard that my plays,
after they are produced once, don’t get additional productions … because
of casting. Theaters claim they don’t know any indigenous actors or
they cannot afford to bring in indigenous actors …

“I would rather get the stories out there to give non-indigenous
people the chance to learn about us, and to show indigenous people that
there is a place for them in theater.”

And so FastHorse decided to write a play that would mock the attempts of theaters to deal with indigenous characters.

The result is the wickedly funny “The Thanksgiving Play,” now filling
Capital Stage with laughter. FastHorse describes its success as “an
opportunity to satirize one of the insidious problems in American
theater: the fear of making mistakes or offending someone
unintentionally.” In this ultra-PC era, its success is indeed both
heartbreaking and bittersweet.

Logan (Jennifer LeBlanc) is a high school drama teacher trying to
create a Thanksgiving play without an indigenous character. She is
joined in this endeavor by her yoga friend Jaxton (Cassidy Brown),
politically correct to a fault, who does street performances about
composting. Logan is also vegan, and the very thought of a turkey dinner
makes her ill.

Jaxton’s idea of how they are going to create the play is to “start
with this pile of jagged facts and misguided governmental policies and
historical stereotypes about race and turn that all into something
beautiful and dramatic and educational for the kids.”

What could possibly go wrong?

Logan is proud of herself for getting a “Native American Heritage
Month Awareness through Art” grant, which gives her funding to hire a
professional actor. Based on a headshot, she hires Alicia (Gabby
Battista) who, as it turns out, is an “ethnic looking” American who can
play several cultures depending on how she is photographed. Her braids, a
headband and turquoise jewelry led Logan to assume she was Native
American.

The group is rounded out by Caden (Jouni Kirjola), an elementary
school history teacher with Broadway dreams. He has lots of research,
but no experience. He wants to start this play 4,000 years before the
present, when European farmers held Harvest Home Festivals.

This well-intentioned quartet brainstorm ideas for the play, their
discussion only showing how completely clueless they are about what they
hope to accomplish. “Do you know how hard it is for a straight white
male to feel less-than in this world?”

Interspersed throughout the play are four different videos of
children from very young to high school performing some kind of
Thanksgiving play. As I suspect these are not scripted, but real plays,
each is funnier than the other.

Director Michael Stevenson keeps the action moving and the laughter
constant. It may not yet be the Fourth of July, but this Thanksgiving
gift is a wonderful crowd-pleaser.

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Everyone's a critic, but I get paid (a little bit) to do it. However, someone once took exception to one of my reviews and accused me of being a bitter hack. Rather than feel insulted, I decided to embrace the term and renamed this blog (previously named the rather bland "In My Opinion") to "Bitter Hack."

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